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Readers of Ta-Nehisi (specifically his pieces here, here, and here) and Conor (here) discuss the relevance of reparations in the contest over the next Democratic nominee for president, as well as the issue more generally.

My father is Cuban. He was born very very rich. Fidel Castro took over, and as a result, my father became very poor. One of the reasons we no longer trade with Cuba is because Cuba nationalized property belonging to Americans. My father’s family businesses and properties were seized while my father was still alive. If this were not the case, today I would be a very rich man, being that my father is the eldest male child. Instead, I grew up poor and eligible for food stamps.

Now that our relationship with Cuba is thawing, this nationalization issue has returned. People in Cuba are hurt by our trade embargo, and beginning trade would really help the average Cuban citizen. One of the biggest sticking points is reparations for seized property.

When Fidel Castro’s guerrillas swept dictator Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959, the new regime quickly converted the island’s governance to a communist system and nationalized billions of dollars in private property, from small homes and farms to foreign-owned utilities, hotels, sugar cane estates and other corporate assets. Castro settled property claims with England, Spain, Mexico and others, but negotiations with the U.S. ended in 1960 when President John F. Kennedy barred Americans from buying from or selling to Cuba. The embargo came in response to Castro’s seizure of refineries owned by U.S. companies that refused, under Kennedy’s order, to process Soviet oil.

More than 5,900 claims with an initial value of $1.9 billion have been certified by the Justice Department’s Foreign Settlement Claims Commission, and estimates put their current value, with interest, at more than $7 billion. Notably, those claims do not include losses by Cubans who later fled to the U.S.

I under no circumstances expect to get paid for the millions my father lost to nationalization. I think logistically this would be nearly impossible to achieve and would end up with grifters getting paid and people with rightful claims being denied. That is why I think getting stuck on this would be very selfish and would hurt people that most need the help.

In that sense it shares a parallel with Ta-Nehisi and his focus on unrealistic reparations for an aggrieved group rather than focusing on the common good. Slavery reparations have the same difficulties, except the timespan is no longer my father; it is a series of father’s fathers going back more than 150 years. In this time period people have immigrated who appear no different than those that suffered under slavery. There have been generations of people living between them. When I sit here and think whether it would be possible to pay off only the people who were born from former slaves the answer is obviously “no.”

On top of that, some of those children of slaves were also children of slave owners. Should they be paying themselves reparations? What about people who immigrated after? These questions go on and on with these thorny questions in perpetuity with no clear answer.

Then the next question comes: Who should pay? You cannot identify just the lineage of slave owners and punish them. You will end up taking from everyone to give to some who may or may not deserve it.

The idea of reparations for nationalized property is currently hurting people by preventing normalization of trade with Cuba. The idea of reparations for slavery is currently preventing the return of racial harmony and a focus on programs that help all without regard to race.

Any outcome of slavery reparations would result in racist ends, as reparations would take from all regardless of sin and pay to those regardless of merit. This is due to an inability to actually punish slave owners and reward former slaves due to how long ago this practice was.

So it would literally be racism. Two wrongs do not make a right. You cannot ameliorate historic persecution with contemporary persecution.

I wanted to chime in on the spat between Bernie Sanders and Ta-Nehisi Coates regarding Bernie’s rejection of reparations. TNC deeply feels that the economic system America has today was deliberately built not just on the backs of slaves, but also on the backs of African-Americans who lived in the days of Jim Crow laws and even since the major civil rights victories of the ‘60s. I find it hard to disagree with this thesis based on the comprehensive evidence he marshaled in his landmark article making the case for reparations.

Who else agreed with TNC that the U.S. economy was engineered for the benefit of rich white people at the expense of African-Americans? A couple of years ago, TNC shared a video [embedded above] where Martin Luther King, Jr. fiercely critiqued the government for rejecting grants of land to African-Americans while officially opening up land in the Midwest to white farmers, funding land grant colleges for their education, and providing subsidies and other funding to prop up their farms. It’s difficult to argue that MLK didn’t believe African-Americans deserved reparations regardless of whether they were the descendants of slaves.

But MLK wasn’t necessarily just in favor of race-based reparations. In his 1967book Where We Go From Here, MLK focused on poverty and explicitly argued against focusing on the plight of African-Americans to the expense of others in poverty:

In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

He goes on to unequivocally state his support for a different kind of policy, an ongoing form of reparations to the poor regardless of their race:

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Our nation’s adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits.

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

There is no question that when we have today more people living in poverty than at any time in American history and when millions of families are struggling day by day just to keep their heads above water, we need to move aggressively to protect the dignity and well being of the least among us. Tragically, with cuts in food stamps, unemployment compensation and other important benefits, we are moving in exactly the wrong direction. There are a number of ways by which we can make sure that every man, woman and child in our country has at least a minimum standard of living and [unconditional basic income] is certainly something that must be explored.

Words are cheap. Action matters.

In that Ta-Nehisi post the reader referred to, he linked to a New York Times essay written by Michael Eric Dyson in 2000. The most relevant passage to this discussion:

If conservatives were to read and listen to King carefully, they would not only find little basis in King’s writings to justify their assaults in his name, but they would be brought up short by his vision of racial compensation and racial reparation, a vision far more radical than most current views of affirmative action. King wrote in Why We Can't Wait that few “people consider the fact that, in addition to being enslaved for two centuries,” that black folk were also robbed of wages for toil. It is worth quoting King at length:

No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.

King ingeniously anticipated objections to programs of racial compensation on the grounds they discriminated against poor whites who were equally disadvantaged. He knew that conservatives would manipulate racial solidarity through an insincere display of new-found concern for poor whites that pitted their interests against those of blacks. King claimed that “millions of [the] white poor” would benefit from the bill. Although he believed that the “moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery,” many poor whites, he argued, were “the derivative victims” of slavery. He conceded that poor whites are “chained by the weight of discrimination” even if its “badge of degradation does not mark them.”

King understood how many poor whites failed to understand the class dimensions of their exploitation by elite whites who appealed to vicious identity politics to obscure their actions. King held that discrimination was in ways “more evil for [poor whites], because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.” Hence, it was only just that a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, intent on “raising the Negro from backwardness,” would also rescue “a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.” For King, compensatory measures that were truly just — that is, took race into account while also considering class — had the best chance of bringing healing to our nation's minorities and to the white poor. It was never one or the other; both were a moral priority for King.

Any history scholars out there want to chime in? Drop us an email. On a related note, a reader points to one of Dr. King’s most famous associates:

I was looking into the role that Bernie Sanders played in Jesse Jackson’s win in the 1988 Vermont primary, and it turns out Jackson’s platform that year included reparations to descendants of black slaves. I wasn’t able to find any of Sanders’ statements from that time on reparations, but it would at least seem that he is not so hostile to the idea as Mr. Coates (whose work I greatly respect and enjoy) would seem to suggest.

Women work on the Cheyenne reservation at Lame Deer, Montana, on Jan. 24, 1945. (AP)

A reader, Sorn Jessen, responds to an earlier one who invoked Native Americans in his concern about the “very real possibility that white America would simply turn its back” on African Americans if reparations were enacted:

As someone who was raised on two different reservations, who joined the military out of high school, went to college afterward and even got a graduate degree before moving back, I must say I am tired of hearing Native Americans invoked as political footballs in the debate over reparations.

Seriously, I am absolutely tired of this. People mention indigenous poverty on the reservation as if somehow that means that social justice is a zero sum game. It’s not and it never has been. To most Americans, indigenous people are an abstraction, reservations are places they go to gamble, and unless they have a piece of frybread at the American Indian Museum, they wouldn’t ever think of indigenous folks as actual political actors. All of this makes me rather sad. The folks I know, love and care about are actual people. They have voices, they can speak for themselves, and they are still around to tell you about their stories of segregation and civil rights.

Look, for a long time I was rather angry at that line in “The Case for Reparations” where Ta-Nehisi says: “African Americans still remained—by far—the most segregated ethnic group in the country,” when he’s never been to a reservation in his life.

I still wish he had qualified his statement to include native folks living on the reservation, but hey, he didn’t and so that means the story of indigenous segregation still has to be written. Coates said repeatedly that he’d love to read a work on indigenous folks and housing segregation. Maybe someday there’s a story that way.

To be honest, despite the wonderful work of more than two generations of activists, despite Alcatraz and Wounded Knee and all the wonderful work of AIM, of Russell Means and Idle No More and so many others, we still lack a language for indigenous civil rights in these United States. So, in retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have had such a knee-jerk reaction to that line in “The Case for Reparations.” Coates’s amnesia mirrors the amnesia of the rest of the nation as a whole.

Yet with all of that being said, his ignorance of indigenous civil rights in no way excuses other folks who talk about Indians as if their ongoing struggles mean that somehow the nation shouldn’t pay African Americans anything. Justice is not something that the majority of Americans get to deny to one group of people because they can point to another group who had it worse.

The institutionalized racism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where BIA police often lack jurisdiction to arrest white folks who commit crimes on the reservation, in no way invalidates the horrors of sharecropping or lynching. Just because a bank used to red-line in Lame Deer in the 1990s doesn’t mean that when it happened on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s that it was somehow ok. The 90 percent unemployment on the Pine Ridge reservation in no way invalidates the higher-than-average unemployment rates among African Americans.

If anyone wants to have a real discussion how segregation and voting rights on the reservation mirrors the Jim Crow south, send them my way. It’s an important topic and it desperately needs a full exposition.

The address is hello@theatlantic.com. (FYI, I ran this email by Ta-Nehisi and he gave me the go-ahead to post with reply.) For more on the theme of Native Lives Matter, see this previous note from Caty, who served up a lot of statistics in an email from Nolan Hack, an African American activist involved in social justice for Native Americans.

Perhaps I am not familiar enough with the debate, but I rarely see anyone discuss what happens afterreparations are made. Speaking as a white person, my experience tells me that, collectively, the quickest way for us to stop caring is to write a check. I don’t necessarily mean this literally, but simply the act of paying a price in exchange for something is a signal that it’s no longer an issue.

When it comes to issues of race, providing reparations would not and could not be the end of the discussion in this nation. Yet I strongly suspect that for the majority of the white population, the conversation would be over. When protests over some mistreatment were to occur post-reparations, it would not slowly win over voters, as is the case with Black Lives Matter. Instead, I think they would be met with unbridled rage. “We paid reparations! We did what you wanted, now any problems are your issue!”

Some effort has been made to make up for their harsh treatment over America’s history. Native Americans may have lost their land, but they receive a degree of autonomy and even a few special privileges—notably gambling, which can actually be quite lucrative if managed well—specifically intended as a form of recompense.

And now their issues are largely ignored. The Indian Health Service provides healthcare on the reservations, so why should non-Native Americans care about substance abuse in the Native-American community? They have legalized gambling, so why should non-Native Americans care about poverty on reservations?

It’s possible that the African-American community might be too large and widespread for the nation’s whites to similarly ignore their issues, but given history, I’d say it’s a very real possibility that white America would simply turn its back on them.

I found Mr. Friedersdorf’s piece disappointing. He, like so many of Coates’s critics, proceeds from what I see as a false premise. I think Coates is being deliberately—and usefully!—provocative in using the term “reparations” because he knows that would-be naysayers will automatically assume this means payment to black folks—a concept so morally, economically, logistically, and demographically fraught that it provokes all kinds of emotional—and therefore honest, reactions.

Ever since first reading “The Case for Reparations,” though, I immediately grokked what I think is a much more interesting, and even more difficult, argument from Coates:

Reparations—except for those for whom specific monetary harm can be identified, such as through redlining—are not an exchange of silver for our collective moral penitence. Reparations, as Coates reads to me, are a moral, intellectual, and historical exercise. The closest analogy I can think of is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

This would be a monumental undertaking. It would be immensely painful, because it would involve going to war against our national hagiography, our very own sense of self as Americans and the intrinsic, inherent virtues we attribute to our Founding and the ideals that led to it. Worse, it would demonstrate to us that those still living and we ourselves continue to fail to live up to those ideals.

This is part of what Coates is doing when he repeats, with frequency, that ours is a nation founded upon white supremacy. It slashes through all the meat of our Constitution, of our sense of the United States as the harbinger of liberal democracy and equality, straight to the bone. All of our growth and success hinges upon what came before, the bedrock that was laid by the forced labor of natives, of blacks, of indentured servants, through rape and plunder, through lash and club. Realization of that moral monstrosity, its sheer weight and importance to everything we do and have done that is good—that this moral dichotomy exists in fore-bearers and grandparents that we revere—imperils our sense of self as a people.

Ultimately, this painful process would demonstrate a need for national action on the forces slavery, white supremacy, and westward expansion put in motion and still affect our communities today. And, I think, it would force all Americans to realize that which those of us who do not believe in a redeemer of sins already know: There is no such thing as absolution for what has gone before, only atonement to rectify its effects—and the work of atonement may never be complete.

Elliott made a much shorter version of that argument in the comments section, claiming that Conor is “conflating ‘payment’ with Coates’s concept of reparations.” Conor replied:

I discuss payment here, rather than the call for study and unspecified further steps in his 2014 article, because when Bernie Sanders was asked about reparations, the answer he gave––and that Ta-Nehisi critiqued––was presumably aimed at the common understanding of the policy, not the uncommon definition published in one magazine two years ago.

Here’s Ta-Nehisi blogging two years ago about the evolution of his thinking on that reparations essay. (A video that accompanied the essay is embedded above.) After reading the longer, emailed version of Elliott’s criticism, Conor adds:

I want to emphasize that I share Ta-Nehisi’s enthusiasm for the “moral, intellectual, and historical exercise” of grappling with America’s treatment of blacks. I think that his reparations article is justly celebrated as an exceptional instance of doing so. I haven’t seen a single persuasive critique of its informative look at housing discrimination.

And I share Jim Elliott’s notion that it is important to challenge “our national hagiography, our very own sense of self as Americans and the intrinsic, inherent virtues we attribute to our Founding.” There is no greater fan of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, or the Madisonian system of checks and balances than me. But perverted notions of American exceptionalism and delusions of inherent virtue help to explain the inability or unwillingness of so many in this country to fully confront the most immoral U.S. policies, or the amount of damage America inflicted during the Iraq War, at Abu Ghraib, in our drone campaign over Yemen, and elsewhere through our foreign policy.

There are lots of people working to puncture pretty lies about America’s past, to bring more accurate, unvarnished history to the masses. These efforts can be found in bestselling books, blockbuster movies, and platinum albums. It can be found in university classes, the speeches of politicians, and House resolutions like this one. And there are plenty of people writing against racism, civil liberties abuses, and other injustices today. I regard those projects as vital. I try to participate in them.

In my view, scholars, filmmakers, journalists, and other private citizens are far better suited to rigorously examining the past and present and conveying the truth to the masses than the United States Congress. And I’m baffled by the notion that a Congressional inquiry into reparations would produce better, more legitimate, or more persuasive history. It is a political body with incentives to do what is expedient and popular, not to declare what is rigorous and true, and even when its investigations set forth grave sins, as did the torture report, the substance of the inquiry does not appreciably affect public opinion.

In the last part of Elliott’s comment, he writes that “this painful process would demonstrate a need for national action on the forces slavery, white supremacy, and westward expansion put in motion and still affect our communities today. And, I think, it would force all Americans to realize that which those of us who do not believe in a redeemer of sins already know: There is no such thing as absolution for what has gone before, only atonement to rectify its effects—and the work of atonement may never be complete.” But this is wildly implausible.

The notion that “all Americans” will be “forced” to share Jim Elliott’s ideas about our past and what it means for us in the present imagines a degree of consensus that will obviously never exist; and if we excuse it as hyperbole, it nevertheless presumes that differences of opinion on these matters are rooted in historical ignorance or a refusal to face hard truths.

In reality, there are lots of justice-loving people who’ve studied the past more deeply than Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Elliott or Ta-Nehisi Coates, who’ve faced hard truths as fully as we have, and nevertheless come to different conclusions than any of us on matters less complicated than this. Americans will never agree on an ur-theory of race in this country. But lots of Americans with different ur-theories have, I think, at least enough in common to fight lots of injustices together.

In keeping with that analysis: a race-neutral inquiry into housing discrimination would, I think, produce a lot less heat and a lot more light than an inquiry into reparations for African Americans by a body elected to represent a country that opposes reparations by huge margins.

Update from Jim Elliott:

Thank you very much for both including my message in the discussion and for forwarding it on to Mr. Friedersdorf. If you could, please be so kind as to extend my thanks to him for a thoughtful reply. In it, he demonstrates perfectly why that while I frequently disagree with him, I should never stop reading him: He is thoughtful and moves discussions forward on important issues.

It is an odd feeling to be taking the position of hope in this case, when I’m so much more comfortable in the role of curmudgeon, and to be doing so against Mr. Friedersdorf’s cynicism when I typically equate him with a much more idealistic point of view.

Mr. Friedersdorf dismisses a commission as a Congressional inquiry, though this is not the correct interpretation of what a “truth and reconciliation” commission would look like. He should look to something more like the 9/11 Commission, rather than, say, the Benghazi committee, as his model. The 9/11 Commission actually performed its duties quite admirably.

Perhaps I have—ironically!—too much faith in intellectual honesty. I think that facts, once given the weight of transparent and rigorous inquiry, gather enough mass and velocity as to become an irresistible force; their arrival and impact can only be delayed. Even were Mr. Friedersdorf correct, would not the process of identifying the effects of those historical forces lead, rather inevitably, to, as Mr. Friedersdorf puts it, identifying common injustices that need remedy?

I agree with many of Mr. Coates’s critics that dismissing Senator Sanders’s approach because it is class-based would be foolhardy, because the practical effects would be worthwhile for addressing some of the ills and injustices that exist today, whatever their root causes (many diseases have similar symptoms, and similar cures, to use an imprecise analogy).

By the way, Elliott informs me that he and other members of Ta-Nehisi’s old commenting community are “resurrecting the mini-Horde” via Disqus’s discussion channels—for example, this one addressing TNC’s latest post, “Hillary Clinton Goes Back to the Dunning School.” Check it out if you’re interested in a taste of what his comment section used to be like, before it closed last fall.

On that question, Ta-Nehisi has written two pieces so far—here and here. A reader responds via hello@:

It is not necessary to debate the merits of reparations to know that black people in the U.S. will be the primary (statistically very over-represented) beneficiaries of any significant class-based redistribution of wealth and income, and therefore that their interests will be vastly better served by a Sanders victory than by that of any other presidential contender.

At this particular historical conjecture, one of the responsibilities of anti-racists is to make those facts known in black America so that black voters might be persuaded to switch their allegiance from Clinton (who offers no hope for a change in the status quo) to Sanders (who calls for a political revolution that will transfer wealth and power from those at the top to those at the bottom).

Unfortunately, Coates, in attacking Sanders, undermines that effort and thereby objectively works against the empowerment and enrichment of black Americans that would result from the political revolution for which Sanders is calling.

Another reader also thinks any talk of reparations from Sanders would be deeply counterproductive to his goals of social justice:

I really like Coates, and like many people, consider him an invaluable voice on race in America. I’m struggling with his views on Sanders, though.

TNC seems to imply that because single payer and reparations are both not feasible, that Sanders arguing against reparations from a point of feasibility is disingenuous. I don’t see that at all, and it strikes me as far too simplistic.

Single payer is not feasible due to the fact that getting it passed is unlikely. Reparations isn’t just not feasible for the time being, but a complete non-starter. And yes, this is due to the fact that a lot of white people, non-black minorities, and yes, even some black people, simply don’t understand the full scope of the real, tangible, financial damage done to black people in this country through state-allowed and even state-sponsored white supremacy.

That said, I doubt very much that Sanders doesn’t understand the scope of this damage done. Rather, he believes that the best way to currently help the largest amount of black people is through race-neutral economic policies. I think he’s likely correct.

TNC states that economic policies have generally not solved the economic impact of racism, and I think he’s correct about that, but better isn’t the opposite of perfect. It seems TNC would prefer that Sanders torpedo his own campaign (and believe me, he would if he came out in favor of reparations) so he can remain ideologically pure. I disagree with that. And yes, I know this is much easier for me to say as a white man.

So, does it say something depressing about America that we’re still unable to come to grips with this legacy of ours? Of course! But when it comes to politics, results are what matters, and the fact remains that it would be electoral suicide for Sanders to come out on the side of reparations. And if you think that Sanders is the best person for the job, that matters. It has to matter.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

The combination of suspicion and reverence that people feel toward the financially successful isn’t unique to the modern era, but reflects a deep ambivalence that goes back to the Roman empire.

In the early 20th century, Dale Carnegie began to travel the United States delivering to audiences a potent message he would refine and eventually publish in his 1936 bestseller, How To Win Friends and Influence People: “About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.” Carnegie, who based his claim on research done at institutes founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (unrelated), thus enshrined for Americans the notion that leadership was the key to success in business—that profit might be less about engineering things and more about engineering people. Over 30 million copies of Carnegie’s book have been sold since its publication.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

The combination of suspicion and reverence that people feel toward the financially successful isn’t unique to the modern era, but reflects a deep ambivalence that goes back to the Roman empire.

In the early 20th century, Dale Carnegie began to travel the United States delivering to audiences a potent message he would refine and eventually publish in his 1936 bestseller, How To Win Friends and Influence People: “About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.” Carnegie, who based his claim on research done at institutes founded by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (unrelated), thus enshrined for Americans the notion that leadership was the key to success in business—that profit might be less about engineering things and more about engineering people. Over 30 million copies of Carnegie’s book have been sold since its publication.